The Price of Blood by Chuck Logan Read Free Book Online Page B

One south of the smoking pile of bricks that had been Quang Tri City. Thousands of refugees and dispirited ARVN soldiers crossed that bridge to an illusion of safety. Then Jimmy Tuna blew it under the first T-54 stupid enough to attempt to cross .
    They walked to Hue City with barely a hundred men, all that remained of Trin’s regiment. Back home the public didn’t know. They didn’t care .
    The army knew. LaPorte’s Stand added another flourish to his legend. They said he was on a fast track to being General of the Army. A West Point maverick out of New Orleans, he vowed to stay in Vietnam to the very end, with Tuna and Pryce and Col. Trin. And it was at the very end that Broker was invited back into the company of these “Last Dogs” to aid in the Evacuation. And that’s when LaPorte’s career was virtually destroyed and Broker, Tuna, and Trin narrowly missed dying .
    Nina’s father brought them all down when he went into business for himself and died in dishonor .
     
    Broker had been briefly stationed at Fort Benning with Ray Pryce and had met his family and had supper at his home. After Pryce’s death, in the awkwardness of youth, and believing that the sins of fathers should not be visited on children, Broker had tried to be a comfort to the dead man’s family when all their other friends shunned them .
    After that visit, Nina kept track of him. She’d written long tortured letters to him throughout her adolescence. Then she’d run away from home in Michigan at sixteen, hitchhiked to Minnesota, and presented herself in the midst of Broker’s failing marriage. With her mother’s permission, he gave her shelter for the entire summer before her senior year in high school. J.T. Merryweather pointed out that the gawky teenage girl was the straw that broke the bitch’s back and sank Broker’s marriage. J.T. thought it was a good thing—Broker got free and Nina straightened out. For a while .
    Smart as hell, she finished her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan in three years. Broker attended her graduation. Nobody was surprised when she squared away the huge chip on her shoulder and enlisted in the army. The new volunteer army required some of the old action and needed a certain kind of young person to stiffen its ranks. The kind of kid who’ll walk out there and stick her finger in some roadkill. Nina had been like that at twenty-one .
    Cards came at Christmas and always on his birthday. And he’d read about her and seen her on the network news after Desert Storm .
    Then, last January, she flipped out again and emerged like a Valkyrie, riding a blizzard that roared in from Wisconsin .
    Unable to locate him, she had pestered J.T., who, in an uncharacteristic lapse, gave in and passed on Broker’s Stillwater number—a mistake—because he was using the house to set up a ring of outlaw bikers. So he met her in a restaurant in Hudson, Wisconsin, a little to the south and across the St. Croix River. She had driven straight through the storm, rounding Chicago from Ann Arbor, where she was going to graduate school .
    She was an obsessed, compulsive mess .
    She’d had two severe blows in two years. Her unpleasant exit from the army, then her mother’s death. Leukemia .
    She didn’t talk about that. Instead, she was back in the past, fixated on her father. She talked about “the cover-up .”
    And Broker explained patiently; he’d been there when it happened and at the classified hearings afterwards. He was no fan of any organization, certainly not the U.S. Army, but the investigation had been thorough. He couldn’t get through to her. From the time that she was a little girl, Nina believed fanatically that the army had it wrong. Now she added a new twist. She believed her dad had been scapegoated by Cyrus LaPorte .
    It was a hard sell. In Broker’s book, Caesar’s wife was more reproachable than Cyrus LaPorte .
    But Nina had made contact with Jimmy Tuna, who had failed big time as a